pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

not talking to morris, just saying it out loud.

sorry, i was distracted when i wrote that.

i guess what i'm trying to say is all it takes is one risk-averse lawyer or "VP of Legal" or whatever to make actual work a nightmare for the worker bees, and to wreck decent copy with a bunch of hedging bullshit. and, again, if you work somewhere like Conde Nast, it doesn't take long for everyone to defer to the legal advice because everyone's afraid of exposure, even if it's a relatively big org.

and by "everyone to defer to the legal advice" i mean your editor and your editor's boss, and so you really don't have much of a choice.

maybe being part of a legacy media org that's conde nast means you have more editorial oversight and are staffed up but uhhh probably not?

with the online news churn of wanting to be the first to post and the general layoffs in the sector it's painfully obvious people are the editors for their own writing (whatever that means) and if gannett and other newspaper orgs don't have editors look at things before publication I don't know why pitchfork would have that capacity

pitchfork has had the same news editor for like 15+ years

maybe being part of a legacy media org that's conde nast means you have more editorial oversight and are staffed up but uhhh probably not?

with the online news churn of wanting to be the first to post and the general layoffs in the sector it's painfully obvious people are the editors for their own writing (whatever that means) and if gannett and other newspaper orgs don't have editors look at things before publication I don't know why pitchfork would have that capacity

― mh, Wednesday, May 3, 2023 10:19 AM (thirty-four minutes ago)

i'll just tell you this is flatly wrong. conde & pitchfork are far more solvent than a local newspaper. they employ far less people, and the costs are much lower. pitchfork fact checks reviews and has for years. they don't have a fact checking *department* which means that sometimes things slip thru the cracks, but they do have the ability to put editorial processes in place that a lot of publications do not. *maybe* during the course of a busy day or on the weekends they let news writers post basic stuff (so and so debuts new song on tour) w/o editing, but anything of substance even if its just an aggregation is going to be read by at least one editor.

consider the fact that, despite the nits we (lovingly) pick in this thread, i can't remember the last time pitchfork has had an editorial scandal. not a bad score, or a misstated fact in a review, or a matter of opinion on the merit of a news story. i'm talking like, deleted articles, ppl getting fired etc. and they do real and often tricky reporting (i.e. win butler)

nice!

What about the Nick Sylvester, maker-upper incident?

that was for the village voice but thanks for your input, snrub

Yeah there hasn't really been a pitchfork scandal, the closest I could come up with was some weird Brent D review where he was telling some tall tale, maybe it was a Beastie boys thing?

The most scandalous thing about Pitchfork otherwise is some of the older reviews, for various reasons.

Brent made shit up about the PR firm Nasty Little Man and its president in his review of the Beastie Boys' To the 5 Boroughs:

what's up with that Brent D Beastie Boys review/farewell review?

Pitchfork getting Chief Keef put in jail for violating his parole was like 11 years ago, but still more recent than the examples

oh yeah that is a good one. kinda weird moment of pitchfork trying to be vice. but that was the ryan s era & no shade to him he created a legendary website and cashed out on it but i think there's a reason why conde was like, yeah let's get a professional in here to run this place

2010 was when they said Ginger Spice looked like a [redacted word you def cannot say anymore]

CORRECTION: A previous version of this article contained language that was offensive. It has been removed.

2015 was this hood classic that riled up both the chuds and the dirtbag leftists in a perfect storm

[Editor's note: An earlier version of this piece misstated the number of people of color who have appeared on Belle & Sebastian record sleeves; the reference has been removed and Pitchfork regrets the error.]

But yeah, J0rd's right it really has been a hot minute since a good old fashioned p4k scandal.

Vice was still collecting wild Ls even throughout the interminable "no, no, you're thinking of the staff two years ago, we're good now actually" era

A quick google of <"editor's note" pitchfork.com> turns up some interesting results, including a review of King Geedorah's Take Me to Your Leader (2003) that had previously "contained a phrase that did not meet current editorial standards and has been removed." The Wayback Machine shows that the phrase was "virgin-tight beats."

😳

Pitchfork getting Chief Keef put in jail for violating his parole was like 11 years ago, but still more recent than the examples

genuine question: was pfork, in its original incarnation and general mission statement/m.o., kinda racist?

(it's an opinion question and my answer is yes.)

(and good for them if they've taken steps to change that.)

I don’t think they thought they were, but …

Yeah def. Healthy dose of the ol misogyny here and there too.

sub-question: was it just kinda standard rockism and i'm dense?

They scrubbed a bunch of stuff so they probably agree with you

Fucking WOW

[Huge Trigger Warning, transphobic]

https://web.archive.org/web/20090821143234/https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8036-the-illusion-of-safety/

was gonna say, wayback machine and web.archive.org have a lot of the o_O reviews that were since purged

sub-question: was it just kinda standard rockism and i'm dense?

― my beard exists more than i do. (Austin), Thursday, May 4, 2023 12:44 PM (forty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

It all kinda goes hand-in-hand a bit yeah?

they've scrubbed a bunch of shitty reviews but there are definitely reviews that wouldn't pass muster today that remain.

That Thrice review is absolutely deranged

i got less than a paragraph in— really fucked

wonder if it’s the same guy who is now a public defender and twitter guy in Virginia

it appears so

Indeed I was. During law school. I am not proud of it. My reviews were trash and I was an asshole to a lot of nice, creative people.

— Brad Haywood (@BradleyRHaywood) November 4, 2022

maybe i'm just being an asshole about it but i always imagined pfork authorities at the time encouraging that sort of thing.

"i am not proud of it" is very cringe for all involved. at least they own it. yeesh.

Sounds like he’s saying he’s not proud of trashing records, in that tweet at least

Yeah, for about a year. Then Ryan Schreiber fired me. For cause. The cause being that I sucked at writing about music.

— Brad Haywood (@BradleyRHaywood) November 4, 2022

at least he acknowledges it and is doing good work now

Don't worry, all this and more will be answered this summer in the fascinating journey into the mind of... https://www.mcdbooks.com/news/ryan-schreiber

jeez. ha, that webpage.. . . links to his weekly spotify playlist.

*wow* a playlist with Beach House and Mac DeMarco. *amazing*

In my day Pitchforkers would come here to explain their errors

It wasn't so much advanced planning as one early, internal joke that turned out to be the thing we ended up going with. We are also constantly working to correct and curb our CMS errors but a computer error and a human error are different things.

Whether a reader, or loads of them, finds it lazy or gutless is another matter, of course.

― scottpl, Tuesday, July 22, 2008 10:24 AM (fourteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

re: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11617-partie-traumatic/

I personally thought that was great though, ha ha

"The ghost of late-’00s indie rock will haunt the dentist’s office." 😂

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ed-sheeran-subtract/

it really has been a hot minute since a good old fashioned p4k scandal.

pitchfork's art director (I found her credited her as such in a Sherburne tweet #toomuchtimeonilx) is not only a plagiarist...

https://i.imgur.com/nNounzM.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/Fc32S67.png

https://i.imgur.com/7PaREhT.jpg


...she has never looked at a guitar or heard the phrase "six-string", and is too lazy to even trace properly.

https://i.imgur.com/83bpMPk.jpg

uh thanks imgur

https://i.ibb.co/BwdHGDZ/pf01.jpg

https://i.ibb.co/jgd00cL/pf02.png

https://i.ibb.co/SnfFfmy/pf03.jpg

https://i.ibb.co/LhJKCDR/pf04.jpg

Looks like they took the image down, but no acknowledgement in story

I had noticed that too... I assume she figured she had "changed it just enough" or something, but it was pretty clear what the reference was.

thanks again imgur >:(

sic, they all loaded for me (both times)

thanks again imgur >:(

― least said, sergio mendes (sic), Saturday, May 13, 2023 9:15 AM

THE BETRAYAL IS REAL AND I FEEL YOUR PAIN

(I reupped them all to another host when the imgurs wouldn't work for me at first - then they showed up this morning)

what is The Pitch?

i seem to recall it started out as, like, Pitchfork's blog (?) for thinkpieces (maybe) and/or stuff that didn't quite fit elsewhere? Or something like that?

Now it seems to be half rap songs and half feature-y type things. But the site also has a Features section. So what's the difference between the Features section and the non-rap-song pieces in The Pitch?